Sams Teach Yourself .Net in 21 Days

By Jason Beres

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • About the Technical Editor
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You
  • Introduction
  • Week 1: At a Glance
  • Day 1. Introduction to the Microsoft .NET Framework
  • Day 2. Introduction to Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 3. Writing Windows Forms Applications
  • Day 4. Deploying Windows Forms Applications
  • Day 5. Writing ASP.NET Applications
    • Introduction to ASP.NET
    • Hello ASP.NET!
    • Using Validation Controls
    • Managing State in ASP.NET Web Applications
    • Understanding the Web.Config File
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Quiz
    • Exercises
  • Day 6. Deploying ASP.NET Applications
  • Day 7. Exceptions, Debugging, and Tracing
  • Week 1. In Review
  • Week 2: At a Glance
  • Day 8. Core Language Concepts in Visual Basic .NET and C#
  • Day 9. Using Namespaces in .NET
  • Day 10. Accessing Data with ADO.NET
  • Day 11. Understanding Visual Database Tools
  • Day 12. Accessing XML in .NET
  • Day 13. XML Web Services in .NET
  • Day 14. Components and .NET
  • Week 2. In Review
  • Week 3: At a Glance
  • Day 15. Writing International Applications
  • Day 16. Using Macros in Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 17. Automating Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 18. Using Crystal Reports
  • Day 19. Understanding Microsoft Application Center Test
  • Day 20. Using Visual SourceSafe
  • Day 21. Object Role Modeling with Visio
  • Week 3. In Review

Introduction to ASP.NET

ASP.NET is an object-oriented, event-driven development platform for writing Web-based applications. Before .NET, Active Server Pages was the core Microsoft technology for developing applications that ran through the browser. ASP was a great platform, and it truly revolutionized the way Web applications were written, but it had lots of room for improvement. With ASP.NET, the gap between writing Windows-based applications and Web-based applications has been closed.

Because ASP.NET is based on the .NET Framework, the same classes in the Framework class library (FCL) are available to all .NET-based applications. That means the same coding model that you use to write Windows Forms applications is used to write ASP.NET applications. It also means you can write ASP.NET applications in any .NET language.

One of the drawbacks to writing ASP applications is the scalability issue. Because ASP pages are written in script, the code must be interpreted each time a page is accessed. To improve performance, developers write complex caching schemes, use different session state handling optimizations to improve page throughput, and move code into compiled COM components to increase performance—that all changes with .NET. All ASP.NET applications are compiled. There's no interpreted script of server-side code, and the ASP.NET runtime is a multithreaded asynchronous application, so the core infrastructure is more scalable than ASP. The following bullets highlight some of the major improvements and benefits that ASP.NET gives you, and should also serve as a list of why ASP.NET is so much better than ASP:

• Using the various caching methods in ASP.NET, you can drastically improve application performance with a simple page directive—not any complex code.
• Using the Web.Config configuration file, you can implement robust page- and directory-level security without writing code for each page.
• Using Visual Studio .NET, you have the same Code Editor features that Windows Forms applications have, including auto-complete and auto-list members.
• Debugging ASP.NET applications is just like debugging Windows applications. All the great debugging features come from Visual Studio .NET, not the language or type of application you're writing.
• The event-driven model familiar to Visual Basic 6 developers and Windows Forms development is the same in ASP.NET, which makes application development more logical and very rapid.
• Visual Studio .NET provides a vast array of controls, including validation controls, grid controls, and list controls—all of which support data binding.
• ASP.NET provides several ways to implement session state, including page level, session level, and application level. The state data can be stored in memory, in cookies, in a Windows Service process, or in a SQL Server database, giving you great options for designing scalable applications.
• ASP.NET separates the visual pages from the page logic, giving you increased flexibility in how you design and develop applications.
• ASP.NET applications are 100% compiled.

To learn how to use all these great features, let's start writing an ASP.NET application.

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